Multimedia semantics is more than developing ontologies to describe the nature of multimedia content. It’s the key research area for interoperable, intelligent access to and management of multimedia materials.

Multimedia semantics is more than developing ontologies to describe the nature of multimedia content. It’s the key research area for interoperable, intelligent access to and management of multimedia materials.

There are many metadata standards. More than 10 organizations vie for leadership in content description, including the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, ISO/IEC’s MPEG working group, and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). For a complete list, see the “Semantic Standards” sidebar.

Recent studies show that this diversity is a major hindrance to a common multimedia semantic understanding. So, the first challenge to address in this area is the heterogeneity in metadata description and query languages. We must build better bridges across semantic gaps. We also need to cleverly aggregate and concisely present results for users while providing security and related access-control techniques appropriate to multimedia content. Other challenges include synchronizing metadata information to media and vice versa and managing this relationship throughout the metadata life cycle.

Effective multimedia management must span the metadata life cycle—from its creation through processing, storage, distribution, and deployment—and work whether the metadata is tightly connected with or independent of the media it describes.

Finally, we need better integration of situational context. This includes not only domain knowledge, but also legal and cultural issues, metadata and semantic quality, compression and encryption techniques.

Combining the Semantic Web with multimedia semantics offers interesting research opportunities for social-information management, such as collaborative multimedia tagging, semantics-aware social-media engineering, and multimedia mash-ups. These opportunities were well represented at the 2009 International Conference on Semantic and Digital Media Technologies (SAMT 09, www.samt2009.org). The Virtual Campfire exemplifies emerging systems for integrating social multimedia. This project, led by Ralf Klamma at the RWTH Aachen (www.dbis.rwth-aachen.de/lehrstruhl/projects/virtualCampfire), establishes an advanced framework to create, search, and share multimedia artifacts with context awareness across communities.